The personal computer has recently undergone a transformation from a text and numeric processing system to a tool for managing and communicating more complex types of digital information such as audio, still images and motion video. The addition of these "multimedia" data types places new requirements on computer systems and their operating environments. More particularly, multimedia data consumes massive amounts of storage space, and playback of full-motion digital video requires real-time decompression and high input/output bandwidth.
It is an object of the present invention to provide a system for efficiently buffering sequences of compressed multimedia data.
It is a further object of the present invention to provide a system for queuing sequences of uncompressed multimedia data.
It is a still further object of the present invention to provide a software system which is portable across various hardware environments and operating systems for supporting multimedia application software on a host computer.
Further objects and advantages of the invention will become apparent from the description of the invention which follows.